This special issue gathers scholars from Religious Studies, Anthropology, Art History, and the study of the Americas to reconsider the academic categories we use to connect the cultures we study. In individually authored mini essays and more sprawling group conversations, contributors examine four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” Readers of this issue will find the data described in these pages to be wide-ranging—chronologically, traditionally, geographically, and otherwise. But we are not only interested in variety. We also ask after data’s organization, quantification, and regulation. Taken together, this special issue asks how to characterize these categories. The ambition is that our collective inquiries into such varied interpretive histories and genealogical fragments can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.  

The particular case studies, object narratives, and casting calls that individual participants chose to enter into this endeavor include First Nations commemorative medals and biblical translations, spirit-guided Swedish temple designs, the global industry of Kim Kardashian, and Cuban musicians and Moroccan artists in New York. And that’s just a few of the provocative projects featured in these pages. There’s much more: from grapefruit-scented candles in SoulCycle Studios to autopsy photographs rendered in poem and prose; Sondheim musical at Carnegie Hall and the monetized infrastructure of biblical womanhood blogs. Readers of this special issue will glimpse Fijian tabua and scrimshaw collections on Long Island, bus station clocks in Montreal, felled California redwoods, and documents of extractive industry in Canada, Burma, and Brazil. So too you’ll find discussion of seventeenth-century documents and woodcut images exchanged among confraternity members in Lima, waterproof socks engineered for the twenty-first-century American Muslim market, a mid-twentieth-century professional wrestler cast as Mormon, and a Catholic icon commissioned in 2016 for the Archdiocese of Denver.

Akin to the simultaneously succinct and varied things included in this special issue, the life of this project has also been both meandering and socially abbreviated. It began in 2017 through our participation as fellows in “Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: Arts, Objects, Spaces, Mediations,” a project cycle of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) at Yale University and funded in part by The Henry Luce Foundation. The thematic and theoretical concerns of the MAVCOR project cycle structured the terms and conditions out of which this special issue grew. The contributions gathered in this issue draw readily and advisedly upon key themes of the MAVCOR grant project, as it has been directed by Sally Promey and Sarah Rivett. After meeting for two annual conferences as part of the project cycle, we invited other fellows to participate in an experimental roundtable at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Eager to continue the work begun at the AAR, we then met for continued collaboration in a Zoom salon during the pandemic summer of 2020. In an effort to formalize and expand those conversations into new publics, our thinking has since morphed into the twenty-one individual essays and six collaborative conversations that are included here. 

We initially asked each contributor to submit a single image file, gif, or short video and an accompanying text, limited to 2200 characters. The provocation was to experiment with processes of thinking—individually and collaboratively, in small cohorts and amid tight parameters, as well as part of more open-ended conversations. We sought to play seriously with emerging practices of how writing is reckoned. Ever since Twitter and Instagram started determining discourse in character counts, less likely platforms have followed. For instance, in 2020 the American Academy of Religion instructed that proposals for its annual meeting be 7,500 characters including spaces. Is this new metric simply an alternate calculation to adjust to? Or does something more substantial happen as we move from page counts to word counts to character counts? What is lost? What is urged forward or recovered, even in brief? 

As curators of this project, we emphasize character(s) and characterizing as a way to reapproach these questions and connect them with a critique of our present, especially in so far as “character” is an increasingly demanding measure of work and social life. To our minds, the interpretive openness of these terms prompts thinking not only about social media-driven modes of public discourse but also about archival nomination, definitional approach, descriptive technique, discursive valuation, and the apportioning measures of feedback loops. If “characterizing” could be understood as asking after essential features, it could likewise provide a space for pointed criticism of substantive or phenomenological approaches to any one of the terms conjoined here (“material,” “economy,” “religion,” “Americas”). Hillary Kaell’s study of bus station clocks occasions her proposal of “material economies” as “systems of managed resources,” which assemble component parts and human labor as well as feelings of utopian interconnectedness and the fleeting intensities of globalism in everyday spaces and times. Richard Callahan’s correspondence with Judith Brunton and Alex Kaloyanides about their respective studies of whales, oil, and teak similarly addresses practices of managing resources. Callahan proposes that we should consider the agency of “basic, fundamental ‘natural resources’ out of which the ‘human’ world is built” and how the “work of transforming them sets up basic relations to matter and the possibilities and limits of what it means to exist.” For Laura Levitt, David Walker, and Sally Promey, “the key economic actor and material is the human body, in literal and figurative manifestations.” This special issue, then, does not propose new definitions for each of our four key terms. It offers a framework for their equivocal reconsideration and conjunctive interrogation.

The experiment we set out in our initial call among MAVCOR project fellows revealed the appeal of short writing assignments, especially in the midst of an emerging pandemic. We were happily surprised that so many fellows from the project cycle accepted our invitation. We were less surprised when many of us found that 2200 characters were too few. Each individual mini essay published in this issue includes a calculation of its character count (including spaces). Careful readers will notice that not all scholars adhered to the character conventions we sought to establish at the outset. We are glad for these scholar’s protests—however subtle, however intentional—and find in their variously reckoned rebellions not accruals to be corrected but rather material for continued thought. They ask how counting characters shapes the practices of precision. Conversations and email exchanges with contributors again attested to participants’ diverging responses. Some found the strict parameters creatively appealing (“Love it. Everything should be short,” one participant wrote. “One of the biggest things is I am left wanting more, whereas a longer paper is tiring.”). For others, it was an interpretive battle (“the character count seems to be at war with trying to offer qualitative assessments of material economies,” another contributor countered). What for some was a freeing permission to share a bit of new research turned for others into a futile constriction. Throughout the process we wondered if we were: watering down or distilling? offering propositions for further thought and deeper discussion? amplifying the seemingly endless echo chambers and hot takes of an online economy ever aiming after virality? To our mind, the answer is: yes, somehow, to all of this. Perhaps, reader, you are less ambivalent and more ready to align your response with one or another of these conclusions. We welcome this and invite your own replies, rejections, and rebellions.

In Zoom rooms and in the margins of shared Google Docs, we asked participants to couple their individualized practices of paring down with exercises in collective elaboration. Once each contributor shared a media nomination and mini essay, we all gathered in an online salon to discuss them as a whole before breaking off yet again—this time into small cohorts to correspond in greater depth about one another’s work as well as to address the project’s central question about how to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas. Using the newly proliferating pandemic vocabulary of “synchronous” and “asynchronous,” groups then arranged further meetings over email or Zoom. 

This special issue is not just a multi-disciplinary consideration of American religions. It is also a call for expansive conversations about what counts, and how and why we count. In crafting something meaningful within and against the relatively novel metric of character counts, contributors have thought creatively about refinement and sacrifice, accumulation and concentration, gathering and extracting, congregating and keening. What does it mean to adhere to these limiting parameters? How and why might one reform, resist, or rebel against these (seemingly micro) demands? How much space do we need to follow an idea or an analysis through? What genres—of writing and conversation, scholarship and public discourse–do we need to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas, including our own labors amid them? We hope this special issue challenges readers of MAVCOR Journal to ask such questions and experiment with related approaches in their own work—in the archives and the field, in classroom pedagogy and public conversation, online and off—and to continue to reflect upon the rituals of labor that underwrite the study of religion, its character(s), and the mechanics of its characterization.

Thumbnail image: Sculpture at Frederik Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, MI. Photograph © wsilver via Flickr. CC BY 2.0

This Essay is in complement to Cécile Fromont’s Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022). Clicking on the figures in this article will bring readers to galleries containing further images from the works in which they feature. 

In my book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Central Africa, I study for the first time the visual project that Capuchin Franciscan friars devised and implemented in and about central Africa between 1650 and 1750.1 As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola, the friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides."2 The visual or textual compendia were meant to teach the missionaries that would follow in the veterans’ footsteps about the specificities of central Africa, from its natural environment to its political landscape, to the range of its religious practices from Roman Catholicism to what the friars perceived as heathenry and idolatry.

In Images on a Mission, I discuss how the Capuchin didactic images form a unique and exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800. I also demonstrate that the corpus transforms our understanding of early modern global interactions in several ways. First, it brings to the fore the Capuchin missionary project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has remained largely unstudied, although it was every bit as broad and ambitious as the contemporaneous, robustly investigated Jesuit and Franciscan apostolic ventures. Further, it highlights a set of spiritual and epistemological interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context. The Capuchins worked in the already Christian kingdom of Kongo as well as in many, for the most part independent, polities such as Matamba, Ndongo, or the Ndembo area in Angola, a toponym the Portuguese coined in the sixteenth century from a local royal title that referred to a region extending over the northern two-thirds of the modern namesake country (Fig. 1).3

• 1Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State University Press, 2022).
• 2About these practical guides see Cécile Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith in Seventeenth-Century Kongo and Angola: The Parma Watercolors Texts,” MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 1 (2022).
• 3About the geography and history of the region see John K. Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850, vol. 14 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), introduction.

Far from acting as the religious arm of a colonial project, except in the thin enclave of Portuguese Angola, the friars operated in this geography at the demand, and under the supervision of local powers. They had to adhere to the pre-existing organization, rituals, and tenets of the more than century-old church of the Kongo, and worked in both Kongo and Angola alongside central African scholars and specialists who were essential, and in some cases principal, actors leading the knowledge-making and knowledge-gathering enterprise at the core of the corpus they assembled.

The Capuchin central African vignettes are thus expressions of a discourse about nature, culture, and faith that friars and the people of Kongo and Angola co-constructed in the course of their interactions. They are, in this view, not European conceived and executed pictures of the region and its inhabitants, but pictures from central Africa, molded in the dialogue that unfolded between the friars and central Africans. In analyzing the unique, fraught yet collaborative relationship between friars and central Africans from which the Capuchin images and texts emerged, Images on a Mission probes the mechanics of cross-cultural religious change and knowledge-creation in the early modern period. It analyses the nature, process, and limits of Catholic conversion and the fluid contours of orthodoxy drawn in the confrontations and negotiations unfolding among a heterogeneous cast of European and African priests, local church leaders, devout Christians, apostates, heathens, and cynics. It also enriches our grasp of the cross-cultural dimension of early modern (visual) natural history in offering examples of knowledge honed in the meeting and integration of classical, biblical, and other European written and oral sources with African ideas and modes of experimentation. The page of the Parma Watercolors holding the fantastical manatee pictured as a woman-fish after its Portuguese name and fame of peixe-mulher also recorded, for instance, the anti-hemorrhagic use of the animal’s ribs that friars learned from central African “surgeons” (Fig. 2). 

A primary goal of Images on a Mission is to reveal and emphasize the cross-cultural dimension of images such as the Capuchins’ that, though concerned with the extra-European world, are of European form, created for European viewers, and, at least nominally, by European image-makers. To do so, it takes an approach that considers the circumstances of the images’ creation, i.e. the cross-cultural encounters, broadly defined, from which they emerged, as their actual author. This method sheds long overdue light on visual productions such as the Capuchin central African images whose cross-cultural dimension has otherwise remained all but invisible to their original viewers as well as to later scholars. In the Capuchin corpus, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century image-makers did not name or mention the local scholars and interlocutors who shaped the content of their compositions, in effect silencing their contributions. In turn, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have been poorly equipped to recognize and acknowledge cross-cultural interventions in visual documents when their traces are not visible at the level of form or documented in the biography of their maker, or when it has been naturalized to the point of becoming invisible.4 Considering the circumstances of the images’ creation as holding authorial agency allows to lift this double veil. It points to the cross-cultural dialogues that underlay their making and it invites analyses that see them no longer as wholly European images of central Africa, but as images from central Africa and molded by central Africans in dialogue with Europeans.   

Most of the watercolors and ink drawings that emerged from the Capuchin central African missions have confounded interpretation and remained unpublished in their own times as well as in ours. Images on a Mission analyzes the reasons these images have been so baffling and the consequences of the challenges they posed to viewers, censors, and editors in the seventeenth century as well as to scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Essay, however, focuses on the limited number of prints linked to the Capuchin central African images that did see the printing press, principally as part of Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola. Published in Bologna in 1687 after a long and complex publication process, this book remains the most important source for central African history to this day.5 This Essay also addresses related imagery published shortly after in another publication, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale (Napoli, 1692).6

• 4Cécile Fromont, “Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central México,” Renaissance Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2022): 1221-1265; Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.
• 5Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi and Fortunato Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell' Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1687). About the publication process see Francisco Leite de Faria, “João António Cavazzi: a sua obra e a sua vida,” in Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, ed. Graciano Maria de Leguzzano (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965).
• 6Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento and Angelo Piccardo, Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale, fatto dal P. Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento . . . Continente variati clima, arie, animali, fiumi, frutti, vestimenti con proprie figure, diuersita di costumi, e di viueri per l’vso humano (Napoli: Per F. Mollo, 1692).

Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, a native of the region of Modena, served as a missionary in central Africa, principally in the lands of queen Njinga, between 1654 and 1667. He had just returned to Italy after a long journey through Brazil when, in 1669, the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide, the papal institution for the propagation of the faith, commissioned from him a history of the Capuchin mission to central Africa. His long experience in the region and his reputation as a prolific writer and image-maker made him a good candidate for the task. He immediately set to work. In addition to the documents he had brought back with him from Angola, he consulted the Roman archives, the meager published material on the region, and the writings of his fellow friars.7 He soon produced a manuscript that, in 1671, failed to obtain the Propaganda Fide’s approval for its publication due to the cost of printing such a lengthy book. When Cavazzi set off for his second stay in central Africa in 1673, he left his book in the hands of his brother in religion, Bonaventura da Montecuccolo, who was to pursue printing in Bologna with an alternate source of funding. The project moved forward until the text and images that Cavazzi had commissioned from friar Paolo da Lorena met the opposition of the censors because of the miracles they described. The manuscript was eventually entrusted to Fortunato Alamandini da Bologna, a Capuchin who never travelled to central Africa, for editing in 1678. After years of revision and further review the book was approved for publication in 1684 and finally published in 1687.8

• 7Texts published before Cavazzi’s writing of the Istorica descrizione include the Capuchin volumes Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, La maravigliosa conversione alla santa fede di Cristo della regina Singa e del svo regno di Matamba nell’Africa meridionale, descritta con historico stile (Napoli: G. Passaro, 1669); Dionigi de Carli da Piacenza and Michael Angelo de Guattini Reggio, Viaggio del P. Dionigi de’ Carli da Piacenza e del P. Michel Angelo De’Guattini da Reggio Capuccini, Predicatori e missionari Apostolici nel Regno del Congo (Reggio: Prospero Vedrotti, 1671); and Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade, tratta dalli scritti & ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez, Portoghese (Roma: Appresso B. Grassi, 1591).
• 8About the history of publication of the book see Faria, “João António Cavazzi,” xxv-xxxi.

The final version of the book includes fifty-one copper plate engravings and etchings. Most of the prints are the creation of Paolo da Lorena from Cavazzi’s commission of the early 1670s, including the frontispiece signed “F. Paul.s a Lothar.a Cap. Sculp” (Fig. 3). Fortunato Alamandini conceived and proudly signed eight others “F. Fort°. f.f.” as corrective to what he deemed the “weak” images of friar Paolo, which he had hoped to replace altogether, but was not able to do so for lack of funds (see for example Fig. 4).9

• 9Cavazzi and Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell’ Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini, n.p., 3rd page of foreword. See table in Fromont, Images on a Mission, 26.

Most of the images in Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, whether designed by Paolo da Lorena and Cavazzi, or recreated by Alamandini, have deep roots in the corpus of didactic Capuchin manuscripts, whose format and style many of them share. Only fifteen derive entirely or in part from paintings that Cavazzi composed in the 1660s for an earlier work which was not one of the practical guides, the Missione Evangelica also known as the Araldi Manuscript, covering similar topics as the Istorica descrizione (compare for instance Fig. 5 & Fig. 6).10

• 10Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Missione Evangelica al Regno del Congo: Araldi Manuscript, Biblioteca Estense (Modena, 1665-1668). About the Araldi manuscript see Giuseppe Pistoni, “I manoscritti ‘Araldi’ di padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo,” Atti e momorie della Academia Nazionale di Scienze, Leterre e Arti di Modena 6, no. 11 (1969); Ezio Bassani and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Un Cappuccino nell'Africa nera del Seicento: i disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Quaderni Poro, 4 (Milano: Associazione “Poro,” 1987), John Kelly Thornton, “Translation of the Araldi Manuscript,” (n.d.).

Thirty-three, however, are especially close to one of the didactic manuscripts, the Parma Watercolors created circa 1663-1690.11 The relationship between the two is not directly that of original and copy, but rather one of belonging to a common visual milieu, likely through the existence of a third, common source, until now unidentified and likely no longer extant. The prints and watercolors present to their viewers almost identical scenes, such as that of a funeral ceremony (Figs. 7 & 8) or a manatee, the latter also featuring in Merolla’s Breve . . . relatione, discussed below (Figs. 2, 9-11).12

• 11Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith.”
• 12For a longer discussion of this see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1 and 2.

The image network in which Cavazzi’s Istorica Descrizione participated also included visual material outside of the Capuchin orbit. Seven of the designs are connected to Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta’s earlier and very successful volume on central Africa, the 1591 Relatione del reame del Congo et delle circonvicine contrade. The Relatione was an edition by Italian cosmographer Pigafetta of the eyewitness testimony about central Africa of Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese merchant whom the king of Kongo made his ambassador to the papacy in the late sixteenth century (Figs. 12 & 13).13 The richly illustrated volume received much attention from contemporary viewers and was translated by the de Bry family of publishers and engravers into Latin and German later in the decade, with additional prints.14 Copies of the de Bry volumes were in Luanda at the time Cavazzi worked on his manuscripts.15

• 13Lopes and Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo.
• 14Duarte Lopes, and Filippo Pigafetta, Regnvm Congo hoc est Warhaffte vnd Eigentliche Beschreibung deß Königreichs Congo in Africa, vnd deren angrentzenden Länder darinnen der Inwohner Glaub, Leben, Sitten vnd Kleydung . . . angezeigt wirdt (Frankfurt am Main: de Bry, 1597); Duarte Lopes, Regnvm Congo, hoc est, Vera descriptio regni Africani: qvod tam ab incolis qvam Lvsitanis Congus appellatur, trans. Filippo Pigafetta (Frankfurt am Main: Excudebat Wolffgangus Richter, 1598).
• 15Fromont, Images on a Mission, 445.

The relation of Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s travels to central Africa published in Naples in 1692 belongs to the same visual milieu that produced the prints in the Istorica descrizione. Its nineteen copper plates parallel and complement the prints and paintings in the Istorica descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. The volume, titled Breve, e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo retells Merolla’s activities and experiences in Kongo and Angola between 1683 and 1688 as collected and written down by Angelo Piccardo da Napoli from oral interviews with the missionary after his return to Naples in 1689.16 No information about the commission and production of the copper plates included in the rapidly published volume has emerged so far. It is clear, however, that they share strong kinship with both the Istorica Descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. Merolla’s plates would have been created shortly after the publication of the former and the composition of the latter. The text, moreover, makes many direct or indirect references to the Istorica Descrizione, the publication of which received much attention. In 1690, a second edition of the Istorica descrizione, first published in Bologna in 1687, appeared in Milan, with copper plates copied closely from the first edition. This later, more modest version presented the vignettes bound between pages of text on short strips of paper. The rectangular illustrations were etched several to one large sheet of paper, and then cut into individual images.17 This was the first of many reeditions in several languages.18

• 16José Sarzi Amade, “Réédition, contextualisation et analyse de la Breve e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo [. . .](1692) de Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento,” (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Aix-Marseille, 2016).
• 17Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi et al., Istorica descrittione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola: situati nell’Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Milan: Nelle Stampe dell’Agnelli, 1690).
• 18See Edouard d'Alençon, “Essai de Bibliographie Capucino-Congolaise,” Neerlandia Franciscana 1, no. 1 (1914): 262-265.

As outlined in table 2, some of the prints in Merolla have precedents in both the Cavazzi prints and the Parma Watercolors. Others have links to only one or the other of the works. Consider for example the scene of justice under the tree in Merolla’s plate 12 (Fig. 14) alongside the Istorica descrizione’s plate 24 (Fig. 15) , or the Parma Watercolors 27 (Fig. 16) While the three scenes of justice closely mirror one another, the tapping of palm wine in  number 17 in the sequence (Fig. 17), is echoed, distantly, in the Parma Watercolors 44 (Fig. 18) but does not feature in the Istorica descrizione. 

Others still have parallels in neither. Some have sources outside of the Capuchin central African realm, such as the banana tree in plate 3 (Fig. 19), which is close to the one in Lopes and Pigafetta(Fig. 20). Most of the vignettes without direct comparanda, however, follow templates that would easily fit within the missing pages of the Parma Watercolors, which, in their current state of conservation include 67 folios labelled from numbers 2 to 104, with lacunae. For example, the depiction of blacksmithing at the top of print 16 (Fig. 21) would have found its place alongside the Parma Watercolors depicting work and craft such as agriculture, folio 76r, cooking, folio 77r, or weaving, folio 79r. The compound at the top of print 14 (Fig. 22) would fit alongside the series on architecture starting with folios 23r and 24r, but missing two folios, numbers 25 and 26. The aristocratic man and woman at the bottom of the same print in Merolla, in turn, would insert itself well as the missing folio 69r preceding a similar representation of dress in folio 70r.

Notably, none of the prints in Merolla are linked to the Araldi manuscript or to vignettes in the Istorica descrizione inspired by it. This is a telling detail that suggests that Merolla or his editor Piccardo did not rely only or even principally on Cavazzi’s published tome in the creation of the prints. Rather, Merolla’s illustration program points to its origins in another set of visual models, linked to the Parma Watercolors. It thus stands as a significant piece in the visual jigsaw puzzle of the Capuchin visual production linked to their missions in Kongo and Angola.

The two tables below describe the interconnections between Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, Merolla’s Relatione, and other visual sources in the Capuchin visual corpus and beyond. Visual comparisons can be accessed by clicking on the image number. The images presented in this Essay are the best available at the time of publication, though not always completely satisfactory. The binding for Merolla’s Relatione is particularly tight in most extant copies, which makes scans or photographs of its illustrations challenging to produce. This issue has been compounded by the ongoing limitations on new imaging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Essay assembled nonetheless serves its purpose of assembling, presenting, organizing, and inviting further attention to this important and understudied corpus of images.